Seminarwoche HS 23: Living in Ticino

The detached, single-family house is the most consistent type in the history of housing in Switzerland: farms, mills, villas, family homes, ateliers, and holiday houses are testimonies of its reoccurrence.

The canton of Ticino, situated between the alpine heights of the Gotthard and the flatlands of Lombardy, with its mountain farms and lakeside towns, has a particularly rich tradition of this kind. While in pre-industrial times there was a fixed relationship between the countryside, the home and the work of its inhabitants (e.g. in farms), industrialization and the subsequent expansion of the city and its infrastructures led to a shift in these relationships. Wealthy bourgeois urbanites began to take up vacation residences on the lakeshore or in the landscape of the valleys and mountains above, which in turn changed from a productive landscape to a landscape of recreation and leisure from industrialized life.

During the seminar week we will take daily walks to follow the development of the single-family house and its ecology throughout history and to examine the relationship between the building and the topography, between dwelling and working, and between single units and the infrastructure that connects them with its natural and/or urban environment. Each house will be studied in detail through historic research as well as on-site investigations in the form of drawings of specific architectural and technical elements.